The Successor Read online

  One evening, thirsting to confess, I took the initiative and said, “Do you remember when in the halflight I told you that I … that it was I who …,” she put her hand over my mouth and wouldn’t let me finish the sentence. Pain and entreaty were writ so large on her face that I swore to myself I would never again yield to temptation.

  So now I am condemned forever more to turn all these things over in my mind alone. What things? Questions and hypotheses, hers and other people’s.

  Sometimes I resent her for this. She is certainly entitled to believe I am not the murderer. But all the same, she was in a better position than anybody else to sense my crime. For she was the only person who knew about the humiliation I suffered at the hand of the Successor, about my anger with him and my sudden need for revenge.

  It all arose at the first, last, and only luncheon party I was invited to at his house, to mark the launch of the remodeling project. I don’t recall which joke of mine or of the son’s managed to irritate the master of the house. The wine we had been drinking made us tipsy and we had probably uttered words that could be called sophomoric. Looking daggers at me with his icy stare, he riposted that liberal brains such as ours might find cooperative cow barns more profitable than studying for diplomas.

  That was enough to make us all sober up instantly. The humiliation he had inflicted made me profoundly resentful. Under his own roof, in this great residence that I was about to transform into an object of beauty, he dared to threaten me, the architect, with mucking out cattle on a cooperative farm! As I plodded home, resentment boiled over into rage. The anger was hot and unprecedented, it seemed to be coming from various spirits that had come to inhabit my body.

  I felt breathless even as I sauntered along the banks of the Lana. My fury, far from subsiding, grew only worse, becoming blind and violent, and was already beginning to merge into a thirst for revenge.

  I was beside myself. I was clearly suffering some kind of sudden madness. The feeling that this could not be just a matter of an offended luncheon guest experiencing a fit of anger but had to come from a longer-standing resentment passed through my mind once again. The entire mass of certain other former architects’ rancor weighed heavily on my heart. All those abuses inflicted at the foot of the pyramids, forty centuries ago — hands cut off, eyes put out. Screams percolating from the dungeons in the Tower of London. The moaning of Minos, the inventor of the fearsome Labyrinth. Pleas made to the palace of the Atreides. To the palace of Ceausescu …

  Everyone was crying out for vengeance in a land where, after reigning for a thousand years, the ancient Customary Law of the Kanun had just been buried. Moreover, all my predecessors expected it from me, their great-great-grandson in misfortune, bereft of the arms or the courage to do justice to them.

  What could I do, except make the renovation as ugly as possible?

  I was the first to be taken aback by this additional fit of madness …

  A ghastly residence … I felt like bursting out laughing at this petty vengeance, but it made me immediately want to burst into tears. When I got home, my wife blanched as soon as she saw me. “What are you saying, my darling sparrow?” she said over and over, as I told her what had happened. Imagining the worst, as was her wont, she could already see us deported to a muddy outpost, with me shoveling dung and she milking goats.

  As always when this kind of thing happened, we ended up in bed. We moaned a lot louder than my persecuted predecessors.

  Later on, we had coffee and tried to calm each other down. “You thought of making a mess of the residence, didn’t you?” she asked, without managing to laugh. I begged her not to nag me about that again. I promised her that if I was not taken off the job I would make the house the most beautiful residence in the whole of Albania. If they let me, I said more than once, if only they let me get on with it …

  I worried for a whole week until a telephone call from the department responsible for state apartments made me understand that there had been no change in the assignment.

  I felt resurrected, and had all the trouble in the world waiting until the next dawn to get to my studio. Grades, angles, and drafts seemed just as eager to jump back into my hands. In an instant they seemed to have joined together in a kind of inner harmony. To such an extent that I often had the impression that during the night, while I was sleeping, they were quietly getting on with putting on finishing touches themselves. It lasted two whole days. My two assistants didn’t hide their amazement. They now whispered, “A masterpiece!” without the slightest fear that they might be suspected of toadying. During the afternoon coffee break, we often said nothing, but it was obvious that our thoughts were revolving in common around the work at hand.

  It was on just such an afternoon, in the midst of a silence pulsating with emotion, that I almost shouted out loud, “You idiot!” To judge by the expression on my assistants’ faces, I could see I must have been smiling in that foolish way my wife found so appalling, for she knew that it was my means of dissimulating and hiding secrets. Remembering my brief fit of stupid hate, when I had thought of making an unholy mess of the remodeling project, I almost burst into guffaws. That might in fact have been what I was gearing up to do spontaneously, without further reflection, but suddenly something switched, as if there had been an eclipse. An icy wind blew in from the distant past and suddenly enveloped me with an idea I had heard spoken of somewhere or other: in architecture as in all other domains, it is not ugliness, but its opposite, beauty, that can be fatal.

  Six royal stallions …

  It was the voice of my Hungarian teacher telling us a tale from days of yore, a story about a king of France envying one of his vassals for his splendid château. It all came back to me with astonishing precision. Six royal stallions at full gallop through the dark of night … Words spoken twenty-five years ago echoed in my ears as if they had been uttered just yesterday; similarly, I could feel myself sinking back into the drowsiness induced by the overheated classroom in the Budapest Architecture School. The vassal had not only had the cheek to have a castle built that was even finer than the king’s, but he had invited his monarch to its inauguration party.

  Kiralyi hatos fogat* six of the king’s horses, at full gallop they rode …

  I wanted to get it out of my mind but I could not.

  Three hours after midnight, his face twisted by rage, the king and his escort set off at a gallop for Paris.

  “Are you feeling okay?” one of my assistants asked.

  I must have acknowledged the question some way or other. The thought that it was the overweening vassal and not the architect who had been punished began to soothe my spirit a little. Yes, it was the vassal, a kind of Successor, who had been struck down for having dared to compete with the monarch …

  *In Hungarian in the original.

  As I sipped my second cup of coffee, it struck me that the memory had probably not come back to the surface by mere chance. Incomplete snatches of sentences, evasive glances, and awkward silences swirled around in my mind like a cloud of dust suddenly brought into focus by a shaft of sunlight … This residence is beginning to look splendid … It’s unbelievably handsome … Maybe even more handsome than … more beautiful than … than the …

  The light of their lanterns scouring the dark canopy of trees, the royal six-in-hand raced along at breakneck speed, drawing ever nearer to Paris. Inside the coach, where it was darker than night, the monarch mulled over the revenge he was about to mete out to his vassal.

  “Khaany mori zurgaan,” I said under my breath, mechanically reciting the phrase my professor had taught me, not in Hungarian but in Mongol. It was one of those jokes that generate spontaneously in a circle of students and then spread all the more easily for their complete zaniness. It had started right after the class, as we were going into the canteen for lunch. Jan, the Slovak in the class, put on the professor’s voice and called out from afar to the waitress, “I’ll have a royal six-in-hand with mashed potatoes, please!” We all burs
t out laughing, but the laughter turned to applause when Cong, our Mongolian comrade, a normally very shy fellow, took up the refrain and bellowed, “I’ll have a royal six-in-hand too, thank you very much!” … Amid the general hilarity, the inevitable happened: We asked our Mongolian to give us the same quotation in his native language, and that’s the bizarre reason why the celebrated line became part of the folklore of the Architecture School in Mongol: Khaany mori zurgaan.

  “How about a bit of fresh air?” one of my assistants shyly suggested.

  As we walked I felt more and more uneasy. I was in a hurry to get back inside the studio so as to look over the drawings again.

  An ill light seemed to be falling on them now.

  I tried to reassure myself. It was a different age, full of whimsical kings and madcap vassals. But a small voice inside me said the opposite: Regimes change, as do customs and cathedrals, but crimes are ever the same. And envy, the prime though oft-forgotten mover of crime, doesn’t fade away but grows ever blacker.

  I kept my eyes glued to the drawings. I had never thought before then that a murder could be seen in that way. As I picked up my ruler and pencil it was as if I was taking hold of the tools of crime. I kept telling myself: It is still in your power to avoid a fatal outcome. You can still make these blades into instruments of salvation, like the surgeon’s knife.

  Well, that’s what I thought … All I needed to do was to touch up the blueprint. To spoil the proportions, to destroy the inner harmony. In a word: to mess it up.

  I was besieged by thoughts of that kind especially at night. At the hour of pity, as I nicknamed it. Stop shilly-shallying! Go on, save one life, or rather, the lives of a whole family, and maybe hundreds of other lives as well.

  At such times it seemed that my mind was made up. But in the light of the new day, my other inclination, my evil side, had no trouble reasserting itself. Apparently, aesthetic beauty had no truck with pity. It got on rather better with Death than its opposite.

  Once again I tried to find reassurance. That old story had taken place more than three hundred years earlier. It was a different period, there was private property, laws weren’t the same as now. However, that didn’t stop me in any way from having a clear vision of the king of France’s anger, and I could see him in the pale light of dawn, all bespattered with the dirt of the journey, drawing up the decree laying down his vassal’s sentence. And as one thing leads to another, I could envision the Guide’s resentment of his Successor. In his own lifetime, he dared to build, barely a few paces away, a finer residence than his own. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine how large his statue would be after his death.

  As soon as I got back to the studio with my head spinning from these thoughts, I pored over the architectural drawings to get down to work. I took out a balcony, I shortened two pillars, but instead of spoiling the villa as I intended, the changes only added to the perfection of the plans.

  Had anyone known my inner turmoil, he or she would presumably have accused me of being petty-minded, of attempting by underhand means to take revenge for the offense suffered at that now far-off luncheon with the Successor.

  May my soul be witness to the fact that the offense had long been expunged from my heart. What was happening could be ascribed to anything you like, save to that episode.

  Something quite different was at stake. Something a thousand times more secret and by the same token far more painful. It was my own hell, which I had sworn to divulge to no living being, to my dying day. That pain had to do with art. I had betrayed it. By my own hand I had stifled my own talent. We all did the same, and for the most part we all had the same excuse for our contempt of art: the times we lived in.

  It was our collective alibi, our smokescreen, our wickedness. There was socialist realism, indisputably; there were laws, actually not so much law as a reign of terror, but in spite of all that, we could have drawn at least a few harmonious lines, even if only haphazardly, as in a dream. But our fingers were all thumbs, because our souls were bound.

  I was probably one of the few who asked themselves the fateful question: Do I or do I not possess any talent? Was it the age that had turned my hands into clay, or was I so clumsy that I would have vegetated no matter what period I lived in — in the capitalist era, in the feudal age, at the end of paganism, at the dawn of Christianity, in the Paleolithic, under the Inquisition, or at the time of post-Impressionism? Would I not have exclaimed and lamented in all and any age that I would have been a great artist but for Pharaoh Thutmose blocking my gifts, but for Caligula, but for McCarthy, but for Zhdanov …

  When at the end of a storm-tossed afternoon I poured my heart out to my wife, she replied with tears in her eyes, “If you are going through such pain, you must be unlike the others.”

  Perhaps I am … In what looked like an unending wasteland, she planted the first seed of hope.

  At that luncheon with the Successor, alongside humiliation I felt a vague, as yet ill-defined foreboding of fame. Of course I was offended … but at the sovereign’s table. Like my illustrious predecessors who dined with Nero, with the ruler of the Middle Empire, with Stalin, with Kubla Khan. They too had been threatened with relegation.

  Later on, when the fear of punishment had subsided and I was back in the studio, I felt not that my hands were even more tied, but the opposite. Something seemed to have been released inside me. That freeing suddenly made me feel I had jumped over the rainbow, a fantasy we had as children when we imagined that was how boys could turn into little girls and girls could become boys.

  What I actually felt was that I had taken a step of much greater import: I had escaped from the desert of mediocrity. That was the straw I clutched at, and it kept me afloat.

  Absorbed as I was by the beauty of the planned remodeling, I lost track of all those thoughts. Sometimes when I looked over the drawings I said to myself: This is the residence of a Communist sovereign. A private dwelling in a country where collective property is the rule. An androgynous building half built under the monarchy, and half built now. That’s why it had such a foreign look, like something from very far away. Like a dream.

  All the same, the royal six-in-hand frequently galloped through my mind. I did my best not to pay it any attention. I owed accounts only to my art. The rest was none of my business.

  I was well aware I had taken a dangerous gamble.

  I was convinced I was putting up a temple that would be crowned by mourning. As the saying goes, something to die for …

  An inner voice urged: If you want to save the master of the house and his relatives, hold back and give in to mediocrity. But the other voice answered back: They’ve got nothing to do with you; art is your vocation, its laws alone you should obey. Even if your art engenders murder, your hands will be clean. There is no art without grieving. Which is precisely what constitutes its somber greatness.

  It was at about the same time that I first heard of the underground passageway. To begin with, it prompted a feeling of great relief. So a murder plan had already been around, unconnected to me or my remodeling project. Independently of my proposals, someone had thought that the murderers ought to have a secret passageway available to them, for surreptitious entry into the building. It wasn’t me who had thought of it, it was someone else.

  The relief was short-lived. I quickly recalled that the rumor had been reported to me by the Successor’s son. It was probably his own imagination, presumably the fruit of his curious ponderings on the ties between the two leaders. He talked about them in a bizarre way, calling them ties of blood, and he even went so far as to compare the tunnel to an umbilical cord.

  However, even if they sprang from an exuberant imagination, these wild suggestions were very pertinent to my plan. It was not by chance that they had arisen at the same time as the remodeling project. However much I tried to keep the rumors at a distance, the tunnel was part of the project. Everything was dependent on it. It would be by my order alone that murderers would use it. A parancsomra
ök gyilkolhatnak …* At my command they will kill …

  These notions buzzed around in my head for days on end. It became something as repetitive as boredom. I had the fate of a whole clan in my hands. All I had to do was to make a mess of the dwelling and the murderers would have to stay crouching in the tunnel for centuries. Otherwise …

  The days sped by. The work was nearing completion. The residence was still hidden by scaffolding. It seemed to me that everyone was waiting impatiently for it to be dismantled so as to reveal the new residence.

  September was on us, and the leaves began to fall quietly. The scaffolding was taken down at night, a few days before the engagement party. All around, silence reigned.

  When on the day of the party, that Sunday afternoon, I crossed the threshold, the other guests were already there. I wasn’t at ease in the glowing atmosphere, joyous and relaxed. Suzana, in her pale dress, seemed the incarnation of harmony and proportion.

  *In Hungarian in the original.

  Good wishes were on everyone’s lips. May there be only happiness under this roof! Who’s the architect? Ah, so you’re the architect. Congratulations, a thousand congratulations, what a gem!

  After my second glass of champagne, I almost screamed out: Talk about whatever you want, but not about this house! We can do without your comments, close your eyes, for pity’s sake!

  But it was too late. The assassins had already taken up their quarters, underneath, in the dark, lower down than even the foundations of the house. A parancsot nem lehet megtagadni … The order could not be countermanded …

  A final glimmer of hope lit my heart when I saw the Guide’s blank stare. Though he was trying hard to mask them, the first signs of blindness were apparent. He can’t see a thing, I thought, he’s in no position to make anything out at all clearly. In spite of myself, I imagined him prowling around the house with shuffling gait feeling the walls with his hands, as the blind do in order to form an idea of things or people. But touch does not allow you to tell the beautiful from the ugly.